Is Facebook Targeting Twitter's Newsgathering Capabilities?

It will be interesting to see what other Twitteresque-features Facebook adopts over time.

Mayra Ruiz-McPherson

It is being reported by various news outlets that Facebook will be rolling out a new "Trending topics" feature on its platform over the next coming months.

Facebook has never had a "trending topics" section before but will soon deploy this as a new feature to users in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and India first. There's no word yet when the feature will roll out to other countries.

Facebook has, for some time now, been trying to better monetize its platform and to make it more attractive to publishers and advertisers. In this stead, the social network has been rolling out tweaks to its news feed, algorithms and interface to better showcase ads and news from publishers. It appears the move towards creating a "Trending topics" area on Facebook's user dashboard is part of this overall shift.

So is Facebook encroaching on Twitter's newsgathering capabilities? In two words, the answer is "sort of." While Facebook is certainly not the first platform to adopt trending stories outside of Twitter, in recent months the social networking giant did adopt Twitter's popular hashtag feature and now it will soon deploy "trending topics" on its network.

I enjoy Facebook just as much as the next person but this makes one wonder what Facebook's next Twitter-inspired move will be? Will it change its famous Facebook-blue hue to Twitter blue as part of upcoming interface updates? At this point ... it does certainly seems anything's possible!

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Mayra Ruiz-McPherson is founder of Ruiz McPherson Communications, a marketing ingenuity and digital PR company based in Dulles, Virginia. You can follow her on Twitter at @mayraruiz, via her practice’s Twitter handle @ruizmcpherson or on Facebook at facebook.com/ruizmcpherson.